Region, Nation and Beyond. Ukraine

Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has attracted increased scholarly attention because of its erratic and contested political processes and complex cultural dynamics. The term "Ukraine" itself needs clarification: Does it refer to a geographic territory, a state, a nation or a culture? The incongruent, albeit intersecting, dimensions of "Ukraine" make clear that a single disciplinary approach will not suffice to describe the discourses that shape and define the largest state to appear on the political map of Europe in the 20th century. This project proposes an interdisciplinary and transcultural approach that questions simplistic conceptualizations. It is a commonly acknowledged truth that regions matter in Ukraine. Yet, little is known about the discursive shape of Ukrainian regionalism and about how it affects greater processes of change. The project puts forward the hypothesis that patterns of regional identification in different social and cultural realms do not form a map with clear cut borders but rather overlap and/or form an archipelago. We expect to find similar attitudes in quite distant parts of the country and, conversely, diverse practices and values in regions that so far have been considered quite homogenic. Five subprojects will provide insight to understanding a political entity that gained statehood only recently and is still struggling to articulate its cultural identity. The common denominator of these subprojects is their focus on regionalism. The project will begin by conducting a sociological survey to establish shared concepts and provide all subprojects with a broad, common framework. This survey will be financed by a grant from the Swiss State Secretariate for Education and Research. The results of all subprojects will be synthesized into an interdisciplinary analysis and published. Methodologically the project will combine quantitative and qualitative sociological research (questionaries, in-depth interviews), discursive analyses, cultural histories and hermeneutics. The overarching objective of the greater project is to challenge the dominance of the nation- state paradigm in analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The project will show how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered in conjunction with the nation. Thus the project aims at a reconceptualization of Ukraine as a fluid construct where various discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge. It explicitly moves beyond the perspective of an entity irrevocably defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The present project involves historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Canada and the USA. The planning for this project, which included the two preparatory conferences (Kyiv/L`viv 2008; St. Gallen 2009), was financed by a grant from the Swiss State Secretariate for Education and Research. The project proposed here will result in a collaborative volume of essays and at least 10 scientific articles to be published in international journals. Additionally, the research for four dissertations is integrated into the project, three of them codirected by a European and a Ukrainian advisor, one by a European and an American advisor.

A new view on Ukraine, which point outs regional differences, makes it necessary to rewrite and to re-conceptualize the history of Ukrainian literature, which is not longer seen as a given monolithic entity, but as the result of processes of exchange. This exchange includes not only a dialogue between inner-Ukrainian regions, but an exchange with neighboring literatures as well. In this context the multilinguality of Ukrainian literature in past and in recent times, the work of authors, who did not write in Ukrainian or used other languages too, is of special interest. Attention was drawn to the phenomena of interferences in the Western Ukrainian territories, for example in former Eastern Galicia, where regional Polish and German writing was constantly interwoven with the local Ukrainian literary production. Such a heterogeneous view of Ukrainian literature leads to a new understanding of the canon, deciding which works belong to Ukrainian literature or not. Institutions and authorities defining this canon are researched. The question of the literary canon cannot be examined without drawing attention to the historical and political circumstances, under which Ukrainian literature developed especially in times, when there was no Ukrainian state. Post-colonial theory turns out to be an important instrument not only to understand certain attitudes of Ukrainian literature, but to shape the role of literature in nation-building. This new history of Ukrainian literature, which will appear in print in 2017, will not only provide an alternative to traditional histories of literature, still influenced by the paradigms of Soviet time, but will be a guidebook for users, who have not got a real knowledge of Ukrainian literature. A part of the Austrian contribution to the whole project consists in two chapters of this history, written by the project-leader. The other, larger part of the Austrian subproject was devoted to the question of Polish theatre and Italian opera. Minority Theatre in Ukraine in the long19th Century. This part of the work attributes to the general goal of the project, as it draws attention to regional focuses of theatrical life, showing how non Ukrainian forms of theatre got integrated into the tradition of Ukrainian theatre as a whole. The leader of this part, Philipp Ther had in his earlier publications already done preparatory work, developing a research design, which regards theater and opera as a social phenomenon important for urban society and national identity. His theoretical framework served as a guideline for research on the history of the Italian Opera in Odessa in the first half of 19th century and on the history of theatrical life in Kyjiv in the 2nd half of the 19th century, where a transition from Polish to Russian repertoire took place. Birgit Kuch, who was engaged to the project for one and a half year, did research on the phenomena of Ital'yanshchina, the fascination by the Italian opera, in Odessa, Ostap Sereda worked in Kyjiv, researching changes in the repertoire under the conditions of Tsarist cultural policy. Birgit Kuch collected a lot of data on various opera performances mainly from Odessa newspapers as well as from theatre archives, which is not published until now. Ostap Sereda presents the findings of his three month work in Kyjiv archives in a book manuscript, entitled Musical Theater and Cultural Politics in Russian-ruled Kyiv (1856-1896), which will appear in print in 2017.